How to Get More Subscribers for Your Blog Sites

When it comes to the success of a website, there are a lot of determining factors that play a crucial role. For instance, you need to value the daily traffic, conversion rate, page views and many more. But actually, among all of these aspects, the subscribers are the true life blood of any popular website. In the following, we’d like to tell you some tips about how to get more subscribers for your blog sites.

Actually, the larger number of subscribers means the larger email list. This way, you can effectively interact with your loyal visitors, promote your offerings, inform your new updates and even generate more profits. Now, you can check the following strategies that can implement since now to get more blog subscribers much more easily.

Make the Subscription Process As Simple As Possible

Firstly, you need to simplify the subscription process as much as possible. Here, we mean you’d better stop asking your potential subscribers for so much information as you do previously. Instead, you just need to know their email addresses.

It is not a big deal to know their occupation, physical location, gender, phone number, age and many more. Here, if you want to send your marketing emails in a personalized manner, you can ask people for their first name. There is no need to get their full name, for most people might be cautious to release their personal information.

Personally, we think an effective email signup process only needs three steps.

Enter the name.

Enter the valid email address.

Click the Signup or the Subscribe button.

Inform People of the Benefits of the Subscription

From most subscription form or invitation we have found online, we can only find some simple and general words, such as “Sign Up Here” and “Subscribe Here”. Actually, the truly effective subscription invitation should tell people why they’d better subscribe to your blog site.

For instance, by doing so, people can get the free and instant updates happened on your blog, they can get the valuable weekly newsletter and many more. Even, you can make the invitation much more attractive by saying something like “Sign up for the free strategies to resolve your complicated website building issues”.

You just need to make the subscription invitation as appealing and attractive as possible. Note that most people do not care the email messages you have spent tens of hours to work on. They just care what they can get from the website subscription.

Remove the Sense of Fear

It is possible that you already ensure the enough reasons, incentives and convenience for people to subscribe to your emails. However, they may still hesitate and worry that you will send them a lot of useless, sales and spam messages uninterruptedly, especially if they have already signed up with too many websites. After all, almost all the people hate to clean the junk mails whenever they open their mail boxes.

In this case, you need to kill and remove this kind of sense of fear. For this aspect, we have three valuable suggestions.

You can be open and transparent, telling people what they can get from your newsletters exactly, such as the weekly digests, newly releases, top recommendations and many more. This gives people a sense of reliability that all your emails are worth opening.

In addition, you can leverage the social proof, indicating that there are a large number of people who have already joined your email list. People generally have more confidence in something that other people trust.

Even, you can directly claim that you also hate the spam emails, so you will never send these things to your subscribers.

Showcase the Valuable Statistics

For most webmasters, there is a critical milestone to run a truly successful website – get the first 1,000 website subscribers. If you have reached this number, why not tell people to remove their fear barrier to finish the subscription?

Actually, the number can be viewed as the social proof. It just works like the testimonials or the case studies to prove the quality and reliability of your site. As people are likely to do what others have done, this number can erase people’s hesitation to subscribe to your site. Surely, you do not have to use the number of 1,000. Some other numbers are fine. You can use the statistics based on your true situation.

To showcase the social proof, you can add the statistics with the subscription invitation. For instance, you can use the sentence just like “Subscribe to Join Another 1,000 Smart Bloggers”.

Display the Subscription Invitation Obviously

No matter how attractive and effective your subscription invitation is, if nobody knows its existence, it means nothing. In this case, you need to find the best location within your site pages. As researched, the right upper corner is the best location to display the subscription button or invitation. By choosing it, you can call people’s attention much more easily.

In addition, instead of showcasing it on your homepage only, you’d better make it available on all your pages. Here, we’d like to list some options you can consider.

Firstly, you can consider the fixed location at all the pages of your site, such as the sidebar, the footer section and the header section.

The second location is your Contact Us page. As researched, we have found that if people navigate to the Contact Us page of your site, it means they at least are interested in your site and want to reach out for getting the further information about you. In this situation, why don’t you capitalize this kind of interest by inviting them to sign up for receiving your emails? Personally speaking, this is an effective and straightforward recommendation but is seldom performed by webmasters.

Adopt the Dedicated Landing Page for Subscription

This is an optional strategy you can adopt. If you want to focus people’s attention on your website subscription, you can create a dedicated landing page that is for nothing but for the subscription only.

From this page, you can explain the benefits that people can get from the subscription in detail. Here, you can check the following example for some inspirations.

Ensure the High Quality of Your Post Content

It is true that this practice is pretty critical. However, many of you may overlook this aspect when concentrating on increasing the subscription rate of your site. Instead, you need to know that no matter what you want to achieve, the blog posts must have the impressive contents.

In this case, you’d better take a look at your recently posted articles and ask yourself would you like to read them, to share them and to subscribe to the site to get much more related information? If the answer is no, you have to invest more time and energy into your post contents. Never make people feel disappointed after subscribing to your site.

Provide the Incentive to Encourage the Subscription

Actually, this is one of the best and the most effective methods to get more subscribers to your blog site. After all, this can be viewed as the win-win strategy. People offer their email address in exchange for the gifts or the free offerings ensured by you.

In most cases, the incentives can be the following items.

If you sell something on your site, you can release a special discount for purchasing.

You can offer the PDF documents or an ebook that contain the critical tips and tutorials to resolve people’s burning questions.

You also can provide the video or audio files that can help people tackle some particular problems, issues and tasks.

If you have some upgraded and premium contents on your site, you can offer them in exchange for people’s subscription.

Here, if you want them to become your subscribers all the times, you need to ensure the quality of your email messages and newsletters. If what you send can arouse their interests, this strategy simply works out.

Offer the Subscription Chances before People Leave

It is possible that when people come to your site, they can find what they want quickly after clicking a few buttons and checking a few posts. After that, they will close their browser tab to leave your site, without leaving any attention to your subscription invitation.

It seems that you have lost these potential subscribers. Not necessarily. Actually, you can give them a second chance for the subscription. Here, you can leverage a special lightbox that will popup when they exit your site, showing the subscription form of your site along with the subscription benefits.

In most cases, you may choose to display this popup when people access your site. However, your readers might be bothered this way, especially when they focus their attention on their wanted information. Due to this, you can showcase this popup when people are leaving. Thus, even if people are annoyed, you can get nothing to lose.

Track the Conversion Rate of Your Subscription

This is the last tip you need to consider. With the constant tracking, you can know whether your subscription form and invitation work well. And then, you can make some adjustments and improvements in the right direction.

Integrate the Email Signups with Other Forms of Your Site

It is possible that your website has multiple forms to achieve different purposes, such as the contact form, the registration form for the upcoming events or the subsequent comments, the donation form and many more. Generally, all of these forms require people to enter their email addresses.

Surely, you cannot directly grab these addresses and put them into your email list. However, you can give people an option for signing up. For instance, you can display a checkbox on these forms, inviting people to join the mailing list after filling out all the required form fields.

Make the Signup Easy to Forward

In order to improve your online reaches, you can display a “Forward to Your Friends” link in each email message. This is a useful practice for turning your current subscribers to the website advocates, giving them the freedom to easily send your meaningful messages to other people who might be interested in your contents.

I've been an experienced web developer, SEOer and technical writer since 2003. I worked in many international high-tech companies including Microsoft and Autodesk before 2012. Now I own a startup company in San Francisco, CA, focusing on developing websites and blogs to deliver exceptional results to global readers by leveraging the power of Internet.
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